Nope, it's like saying "there may be designs out there that are safe, but there's plenty of 1970s plants with these vulnerabilities designed into them, and each one of them is a potential massive cluster-fuck. So let's focus on those, shall we?"
It's a good job no-one has crunched the numbers and produced a cost-curve of different carbon abatement strategies, thus injecting some facts into the debate, isn't it?
But we have the world we live in, not the world as we would like it to be. In the world we live in, there are dozens and dozens of plants that were built in the 1970s in operation. It might be outdated technology, but it's still in use today and still posing a threat today.
oh look, you're focused on the question that suits you best, rather than addressing the main point: that you used a rhetorical flourish to denigrate a Mac Pro and have then started pretending that this wasn't your original intention, and that actually you think there's nothing wrong with consumer gadgets, some of your best friends are consumer gadgets, etc etc. Epic fail.
the main thing that distinguishes a business laptop from a consumer laptop is the aftermarket service and the volume discount. You were the one that was insisting that there had to be some important differentiation based on parts, not me. I was pointing out that this is a fuckwitted way of defining a product.
point being: no-one, with the exception of you, thinks of a business laptop as "a consumer gadget". They think of it as a business laptop. Because -- ta-dah -- that's what it is.
how is it helpful to define a business laptop as a consumer gadget? what purpose does this serve to twist language in this way? and who gave you the right to define the Three Characteristics of Consumer Gadgets as being "produced by a consumer gadget company" (tautological, but never mind), "produced in mass for mass consumption" (sic, dipshit, that's supposed to be en masse, but again, never mind), and "use of off-the-shelf consumer products"? What's your rationale for each of those three characteristics? Doesn't the second one, in particular, mean that any successful product is automatically (in your view) a consumer gadget?
let's face it, you used a rhetorical flourish to denigrate a Mac Pro and have then started pretending that this wasn't your original intention, and that actually you think there's nothing wrong with consumer gadgets, some of your best friends are consumer gadgets, etc etc. Epic fail.
what the *fuck* are you talking about? you've just defined virtually every business laptop sold as a "consumer gadget", given that they're almost all made by consumer gadget companies, produced en masse and use off the shelf consumer products. you've disappeared so far up your own bottom that you're nosing around your own stomach.
That's a pretty fucking dumb summary. Apple consumers don't buy Mac Pros, they buy laptops. The OP and GP were about Mac Pros, which are aimed at professionals, typically media & design folks who need workstations. Nobber.
Oh look, the new use of the word better I've heard all about, when what it means is worse. Unless someone else is out there building their professional grade laptops from solid hunks of aluminium so that bits don't fall off, which for damn sure lenovo ain't doing.
Oh really? I"d like to mount my device on a wall in my kitchen and watch videos of Jamie Oliver cooking. And then add the ingredients for the recipe to my Ocado order. Which device besides a tablet can allow me to do that?
It's really *not* that simple. Your daughter and her husband might behave properly, but they've got lots of colleagues who are arseholes, and who have a particular problem distinguishing between "abide by the law" and "do what the police officer tells you". So it's really not that simple. If it was, there wouldn't be a dead Polish guy who had the misfortune to fly into Vancouver one day and encounter fuckwit police officers who were all fired up with power, self-righteousness and Tasers in their pocket.
How do you know that "arly every incident of improper (and often proper on a slow news day) garners tons of media attention"?
That's just an assertion.
I'd assert the opposite: that improper Taserings, and the threat of improper Taserings, typically do *not* garner press attention, because they typically happen to people who have a hard time getting anyone to believe in their innocence. Like young black men, for example.
But you choice of: a) accept "very small risk of death or injury to people who are quite possibly dangerous criminals" or b) accept "much GREATER risk of death or injury to public safety personnel, innocent bystanders, and the suspects" is a false dichotomy. It presupposes that Tasers will only be used properly, ie on people who really are quite possibly dangerous criminals. That is patently not the case: there are multiple incidents in which Tasers have been used on people who are not "possibly dangerous criminals", causing them death or injury.
That's a cost which I'm a lot less willing to pay.
Well, the 'expert' happens to be the feller that helped install the reactor in the first place, so his credentials are pretty convincing in this instance.
Oh for fuck's sakes. Nuclear plants are very expensive. They are kept in operation for decades. So the fact that there are new shiny ones doesn't mean that the old crappy ones have disappeared.
The fire code made sure everyone is out of the building alive, *we hope* -- it's not assured yet. But the building has burned down. It's not a question of mud on the fucking carpet. What an insult to the hundreds of thousands of people who cannot get in their homes because of the nuclear catastrophe -- a needless manmade disaster on top of the homelessness caused by the tsunami.
It's not the Godzilla argument. The disaster that struck was patently within the realms of "perfectly likely" and "not a global catastrophe a la major comet strike".
But that's because the news media are interested in, well, news. It is not particularly newsworthy to report the inevitable cleanup / rebuilding that happens after a quake / tsunami. It is still newsworthy, and here in the UK, it's getting plenty of coverage. However, the essence of the story is: quake kills people and causes damage, then cleanup begins. By comparison, the nuclear story is: quake / tsunami damage reactors. Authorities struggle to get it under control. Situation remains not fully under control many days later. That's news.
It may not be the way the world ought to work, but it is how it does work.
I agree that cars have caused monumental damage. But nuclear plants have the *potential* (thankfully, not yet realised) to cause even more significant damage than that. They have the potential to render parts of the globe uninhabitable by humans for times well in excess of the length of human civilisations.
I agree that in reality, there's a spectrum of safety, not an on-off switch. But I think we've a way to go yet before we can claim such a significant victory as you describe. Containment at two of the reactors appears to be damaged, and as you say the spent fuel turns out to be deserving of much more significant containment than it gets.
I don't know. I don't much care, as I'm not the one wanting to build the reactors. All I can tell you is, we now know that the upper bounds on the design were an order of magnitude too conservative. It wasn't as though a mag9.0 earthquake was outside human experience. It wasn't something that has never occurred since the Triassic period. It was something that hadn't happened in Japan for a few hundred years.
Obviously, the answer to "what do you do if the cost-benefit tradeoff becomes infeasible" is "try to change the variables (eg adopting an inherently safer design that cuts the costs" or "don't include nuclear as part of the energy mix" or "wait till scarcity of resource changes the balance of benefit once more"
For sure. But none of them has the potential for causing such concentrated or long-lasting damage, so our tolerance is higher. It ain't rational, but it's human. No point railing against human nature.
Seriously? You think that dumping 7 tons of water on the *outside* of a metres-thick sealed containment structure, from where my knowledge of the laws of physics, and specifically gravity, suggests it will *drain off* in a matter of seconds, is going to materially drop the temperature of a semi-molten core? You're a laugh a minute, you are. Your willful refusal to engage with the fact that you have been wrong on your major claim all along has moved from absurd to something even weirder. Give it up, mate: the containment vessels at two of the reactors are suspected to be breached, something you said was inconceivable. Time to pack up and piss off.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for posting this. It truly spells out the reality of what has happened. No-one's going to be going back there in a hurry. Very, very sad.
Nope, it's like saying "there may be designs out there that are safe, but there's plenty of 1970s plants with these vulnerabilities designed into them, and each one of them is a potential massive cluster-fuck. So let's focus on those, shall we?"
I've not read a single post which says, "Not much and nothing", has happened. Not one.
Are you being deliberately dumb? The very first post on this entire page, to which the GP was replying, had "Not much and nothing" as its title!
It's a good job no-one has crunched the numbers and produced a cost-curve of different carbon abatement strategies, thus injecting some facts into the debate, isn't it?
http://www.mckinsey.com/en/Client_Service/Sustainability/Latest_thinking/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/client_service/Sustainability/cost%20curve%20PDFs/ImpactFinancialCrisisCarbonEconomicsGHGcostcurveV21.ashx
See exhibit 6
But we have the world we live in, not the world as we would like it to be. In the world we live in, there are dozens and dozens of plants that were built in the 1970s in operation. It might be outdated technology, but it's still in use today and still posing a threat today.
oh look, you're focused on the question that suits you best, rather than addressing the main point: that you used a rhetorical flourish to denigrate a Mac Pro and have then started pretending that this wasn't your original intention, and that actually you think there's nothing wrong with consumer gadgets, some of your best friends are consumer gadgets, etc etc. Epic fail.
the main thing that distinguishes a business laptop from a consumer laptop is the aftermarket service and the volume discount. You were the one that was insisting that there had to be some important differentiation based on parts, not me. I was pointing out that this is a fuckwitted way of defining a product.
no, point not made.
point being: no-one, with the exception of you, thinks of a business laptop as "a consumer gadget". They think of it as a business laptop. Because -- ta-dah -- that's what it is.
how is it helpful to define a business laptop as a consumer gadget? what purpose does this serve to twist language in this way? and who gave you the right to define the Three Characteristics of Consumer Gadgets as being "produced by a consumer gadget company" (tautological, but never mind), "produced in mass for mass consumption" (sic, dipshit, that's supposed to be en masse, but again, never mind), and "use of off-the-shelf consumer products"? What's your rationale for each of those three characteristics? Doesn't the second one, in particular, mean that any successful product is automatically (in your view) a consumer gadget?
let's face it, you used a rhetorical flourish to denigrate a Mac Pro and have then started pretending that this wasn't your original intention, and that actually you think there's nothing wrong with consumer gadgets, some of your best friends are consumer gadgets, etc etc. Epic fail.
what the *fuck* are you talking about? you've just defined virtually every business laptop sold as a "consumer gadget", given that they're almost all made by consumer gadget companies, produced en masse and use off the shelf consumer products. you've disappeared so far up your own bottom that you're nosing around your own stomach.
That's a pretty fucking dumb summary. Apple consumers don't buy Mac Pros, they buy laptops. The OP and GP were about Mac Pros, which are aimed at professionals, typically media & design folks who need workstations. Nobber.
Oh look, the new use of the word better I've heard all about, when what it means is worse. Unless someone else is out there building their professional grade laptops from solid hunks of aluminium so that bits don't fall off, which for damn sure lenovo ain't doing.
Erm, no. Why would I want a wireless keyboard that clutters up my work surfaces and gets bits of food stuck in it in my kitchen?
No person does. Organisations do, whether your employers or your laptop manufacturer.
Oh really? I"d like to mount my device on a wall in my kitchen and watch videos of Jamie Oliver cooking. And then add the ingredients for the recipe to my Ocado order. Which device besides a tablet can allow me to do that?
It's really *not* that simple. Your daughter and her husband might behave properly, but they've got lots of colleagues who are arseholes, and who have a particular problem distinguishing between "abide by the law" and "do what the police officer tells you". So it's really not that simple. If it was, there wouldn't be a dead Polish guy who had the misfortune to fly into Vancouver one day and encounter fuckwit police officers who were all fired up with power, self-righteousness and Tasers in their pocket.
How do you know that "arly every incident of improper (and often proper on a slow news day) garners tons of media attention"?
That's just an assertion.
I'd assert the opposite: that improper Taserings, and the threat of improper Taserings, typically do *not* garner press attention, because they typically happen to people who have a hard time getting anyone to believe in their innocence. Like young black men, for example.
But you choice of:
a) accept "very small risk of death or injury to people who are quite possibly dangerous criminals" or
b) accept "much GREATER risk of death or injury to public safety personnel, innocent bystanders, and the suspects"
is a false dichotomy.
It presupposes that Tasers will only be used properly, ie on people who really are quite possibly dangerous criminals. That is patently not the case: there are multiple incidents in which Tasers have been used on people who are not "possibly dangerous criminals", causing them death or injury.
That's a cost which I'm a lot less willing to pay.
Well, the 'expert' happens to be the feller that helped install the reactor in the first place, so his credentials are pretty convincing in this instance.
Oh for fuck's sakes. Nuclear plants are very expensive. They are kept in operation for decades. So the fact that there are new shiny ones doesn't mean that the old crappy ones have disappeared.
The fire code made sure everyone is out of the building alive, *we hope* -- it's not assured yet. But the building has burned down. It's not a question of mud on the fucking carpet. What an insult to the hundreds of thousands of people who cannot get in their homes because of the nuclear catastrophe -- a needless manmade disaster on top of the homelessness caused by the tsunami.
It's not the Godzilla argument. The disaster that struck was patently within the realms of "perfectly likely" and "not a global catastrophe a la major comet strike".
But that's because the news media are interested in, well, news. It is not particularly newsworthy to report the inevitable cleanup / rebuilding that happens after a quake / tsunami. It is still newsworthy, and here in the UK, it's getting plenty of coverage. However, the essence of the story is: quake kills people and causes damage, then cleanup begins. By comparison, the nuclear story is: quake / tsunami damage reactors. Authorities struggle to get it under control. Situation remains not fully under control many days later. That's news.
It may not be the way the world ought to work, but it is how it does work.
I agree that cars have caused monumental damage. But nuclear plants have the *potential* (thankfully, not yet realised) to cause even more significant damage than that. They have the potential to render parts of the globe uninhabitable by humans for times well in excess of the length of human civilisations.
I agree that in reality, there's a spectrum of safety, not an on-off switch. But I think we've a way to go yet before we can claim such a significant victory as you describe. Containment at two of the reactors appears to be damaged, and as you say the spent fuel turns out to be deserving of much more significant containment than it gets.
I don't know. I don't much care, as I'm not the one wanting to build the reactors. All I can tell you is, we now know that the upper bounds on the design were an order of magnitude too conservative. It wasn't as though a mag9.0 earthquake was outside human experience. It wasn't something that has never occurred since the Triassic period. It was something that hadn't happened in Japan for a few hundred years.
Obviously, the answer to "what do you do if the cost-benefit tradeoff becomes infeasible" is "try to change the variables (eg adopting an inherently safer design that cuts the costs" or "don't include nuclear as part of the energy mix" or "wait till scarcity of resource changes the balance of benefit once more"
For sure. But none of them has the potential for causing such concentrated or long-lasting damage, so our tolerance is higher. It ain't rational, but it's human. No point railing against human nature.
Seriously? You think that dumping 7 tons of water on the *outside* of a metres-thick sealed containment structure, from where my knowledge of the laws of physics, and specifically gravity, suggests it will *drain off* in a matter of seconds, is going to materially drop the temperature of a semi-molten core? You're a laugh a minute, you are. Your willful refusal to engage with the fact that you have been wrong on your major claim all along has moved from absurd to something even weirder. Give it up, mate: the containment vessels at two of the reactors are suspected to be breached, something you said was inconceivable. Time to pack up and piss off.